Postcard from Jacksonville, Florida

Installation view. Whitney Oldenburg: Left Behind, MOCA Jacksonville, Florida. November 20, 2025-April 19,2026. Image courtesy of CHART Gallery, MOCA Jacksonville, and the artist. Photo by Doug Eng.

By NINA MDIVANI March 19th, 2026

What comes to mind when you hear the name Jacksonville, Florida? Before my visit, I had only a limited sense of the city. Yet one encounters a place rich in history, culture, and perseverance. Established in 1822 by Andrew Jackson, Jacksonville became a major transportation hub and port because of its location on the St. Johns River. In the early 1900s, it also became a major leisure destination before Miami took over this role. The city was also the center of the silent film industry, with major studios headquartered here. The great fire of 1901 began at a local mattress factory, where moss used as mattress stuffing was drying outside. A spark from a stove at lunchtime ignited a major fire that destroyed the entire city in under eight hours. Its rebuilding has shaped the city's structure and diverse character today.

The city houses two remarkable regional museums, MOCA Jacksonville and The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, both aiming to revive interest among the local audience in art and open doors to a better understanding of contemporary artists.  The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville is located in the city's downtown, Hemming Park area, an appropriate setting for studying the history of American architecture.Established in 1924, the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville was the city’s first visual arts organization, among the earliest art museums in Florida, and one of the first institutions in the United States dedicated to contemporary art.

Now run by a visionary director, Caitlín Doherty, the museum is redefining what a contemporary museum should be doing for the local community. By aligning MOCA with the University of North Florida, Doherty invites students to be direct participants of artistic processes, including, for example, working collaboratively with Nari Ward on the striking, golden, site-specific installation in the atrium of the building. Doherty and her team open the road to understanding of art to the people, while staging exhibitions to draw the audience and its curiosities to the international discourses of the day. It is here that an intriguing exhibition of Whitney Oldenburg, an artist born in Jacksonville and now based in New York, is presented. The first institutional exhibition is of particular importance to the artist, and Ylva Rouse, the Senior Curator of the museum, created a fitting, contextual space for Whitney Oldenburg: Left Behind.

Installation view. Whitney Oldenburg: Left Behind, MOCA Jacksonville, Florida. November 20, 2025-April 19,2026. Image courtesy of CHART Gallery, MOCA Jacksonville, and the artist. Photo by Doug Eng.

In this sizable retrospective, Oldenburg is presented by large-scale sculptures, smaller works hung on the walls, and drawings. Sculptures are arresting in their scale and the ambiguous effect they produce in the viewer’s body. They are all made of common, quotidian objects – plastic red rectangular tickets, Q-tips, pacifiers, rolled scraps of newspapers, coffee, recycled parts of older works. Yet, what these remnants of human life and their transitory possession amount to in the objects on view is very far from domesticity. The artist wants to guide us towards a deeper understanding and confrontation of excessive waste, production values, and to think of cost-benefit analysis when it comes to our transitory comfort paid by the destruction of the ecology, environment, and habitats. Oldenburg forces us to look in the mirror, and this necessity of reflection cannot come at a better time. We are facing many crises, yet we also need to have accountability for generating them. The forms we see on view remind us of monsters or objects becoming monsters; they are larger than humans, but made of our elements and waste. What we see is ourselves, yet magnified via our discarded attributes. The artist refers to her methodology as the erotic of accumulation, citing George Bataille as one of her intellectual influences. Sculptures are indeed provocative here. They lure us by our instinct to touch and ascertain their reality, but they might order us away the moment we do. A hint of unease is present as the works on view softly speak of our tendency to transform. We could be flawed material creators or ultimate holders of spiritual realms.

On the other hand, the objects we see speak of vulnerabilities. The tacit influences of Louise Bourgeois and Lee Bontecou are palpable, yet the artist holds her ground by remaining attached to the material reality of today. As Bontecou and Bourgeois, Oldenburg is interested in post-minimalism, in process, in anti-form rather than constraints, qualities, and liberties of space.  Donald Judd’s observation of Lee Bontecou’s work and how it "asserts its own existence, form, and power. It becomes an object in its own right" could be used well to understand the allure of Oldenburg. Yet, she offers a different sentiment by presenting to us the openness of her search process.

Installation view. Whitney Oldenburg: Left Behind, MOCA Jacksonville, Florida. November 20, 2025-April 19,2026. Image courtesy of CHART Gallery, MOCA Jacksonville, and the artist. Photo by Doug Eng

The pictured trio of works housed by a gallery exemplifies one direction of the artist’s inquiry well. feeding frenzy, 2022, consisting of tickets, rock, wood, aluminum, resin, string, staples, helmets, earplugs, cloth, zipper pulls, red yeast rice, and glue mixture, presents a three-part vertical statement on the amorphous status of species. This work is almost subverted by horizontally positioning the immovable bed, 2015, minimal in its composition of wood dust, resin, cardboard, glue, and color. One could argue that this gallery presents a genealogy of mutation culminating in limb-like the waning of affect, 2015, a hanging work consisting of a myriad of outstretched fingers or tentacles with a color shifting from white to grey, vaguely resembling a person forming from the fingers down, with a possibility of the rest of the body emerging from the thin greyish mass we also see. 

Once all the shifting and ambiguous connotations of Whitney Oldenburg sink in, a viewer is left with a feeling of wonder and curiosity. One could be scared to see what is to come from this monstrous amalgamation of our cumulative societal presence; maybe it will be vengeance? Yet, we can also be observing the creation of a new species, one that would take better accountability of our ecological, emotional, and social egotism and perhaps create a more harmonious reality. Observing this open-ended inquiry in the heart of an old city that is on its route to revitalization is symbolic.